Shrinking ice sheets and melting ice caps are well known consequences of climate change. But a new study reveals that impacts on biodiversity will be just as severe in other regions of the world. When multiple dimensions of climate change are analyzed, different regions emerge as threatened by different aspects of climate change. The tropics, for example, will be highly affected by local changes in temperature and precipitation, leading to novel climates with no current analogues in the planet. These results, recently published in Science, expose the complexities of climate ...

On Friday 2 May, 2014, The Lancet and The Lancet Respiratory Medicine will release three new review articles and an Editorial on asthma, ahead of World Asthma Day on May 6 and the American Thoracic Society's international conference (ATS 2014) in San Diego (May 16-21). Editorial – Controlling asthma Outdoor air pollution and asthma Asthma genetics and personalised medicine Diagnosis, management, and prognosis of preschool wheeze The Lancet: Outdoor air pollution and asthma Traffic and power generation are the main sources of urban air pollution. The idea that ...

Boston and Cambridge, MA – Researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH), Harvard Medical School (HMS), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and University of Chicago report findings demonstrating how genetic variations among healthy, young individuals can influence immune cell function. Many of those variants are also genetic risk factors for common diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis later in life, offering new insight into disease pathology. The study will be published in the May 2, ...

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Launched in 2013, the national BRAIN Initiative aims to revolutionize our understanding of cognition by mapping the activity of every neuron in the human brain, revealing how brain circuits interact to create memories, learn new skills, and interpret the world around us. Before that can happen, neuroscientists need new tools that will let them probe the brain more deeply and in greater detail, says Alan Jasanoff, an MIT associate professor of biological engineering. "There's a general recognition that in order to understand the brain's processes in comprehensive ...

Corn yields in the central United States have become more sensitive to drought conditions in the past two decades, according to Stanford research. The study, which appears in the journal Science, was led by Stanford's David Lobell, associate professor of environmental Earth system science and associate director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. "The Corn Belt is phenomenally productive," Lobell said, referring to the region of Midwestern states where much of the country's corn is grown. "But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated ...

Bacteria don't have sex as such, but they can mix their genetic material by pulling in DNA from dead bacterial cells and inserting these into their own genome. New research led by Imperial College London has found that this process – called recombination – is more complex than was first thought. The findings, published today in PLoS Genetics, could help us understand why bacteria which cause serious diseases are able to evade vaccines and rapidly become drug-resistant. Dr Rafal Mostowy of Imperial College London's School of Public Health explains: "During recombination, ...

When a woman requires gynecologic surgery, she and her surgeon have several minimally invasive surgical options, including robotic surgery. In recent years, the use of robotic surgery has become more and more common. But questions have arisen about the potential overuse of robotic surgery and its advantages over traditional laparotomy for hysterectomy. A clinical opinion by Charles Rardin, MD, a urogynecologist in the Division of Urogynecology and Reconstructive Surgery and director of the Robotic Surgery Program for Women at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, ...

OAKLAND, Calif., May 2, 2014 — Women with high levels of a common liver enzyme measured prior to pregnancy were twice as likely to subsequently develop gestational diabetes than those with the lowest levels, according to a Kaiser Permanente study published today in the journal Diabetes Care. The liver plays an important role in regulating glucose levels in the body. The liver enzyme, called gamma-glutamyl transferase (known as GGT), is a common marker of liver function and has also been associated with insulin resistance, which can be a precursor to gestational diabetes ...

The so-called Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus was first found in June 2012 in a patient from Saudi Arabia, who suffered from severe pneumonia. Since this time more than 300 persons have developed an infection, of whom about a third died. The fact that the Arabian camel is the origin of the infectious disease has been confirmed recently. The transmission pathways of the viruses, however, have not been clear until now. Viruses in humans and camels from one region are identical Virologists Norbert Nowotny and Jolanta Kolodziejek from the Institute ...

The periodic table of the elements is to get crowded towards its heaviest members. Evidence for the artificial creation of element 117 has recently been obtained at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, an accelerator laboratory located in Darm-stadt, Germany. The experiment was performed by an international team of chemists and physicists headed by Prof. Christoph Düllmann, who holds positions at GSI, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM). The team included 72 scientists and engineers from 16 institutions in Australia, ...

The drug sofosbuvir has been available since January 2014 as a treatment for chronic hepatitis C infection. In an early benefit assessment pursuant to the Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG), the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has now examined whether the new drug offers added benefit in comparison with the appropriate comparator therapy. The dossier submitted by the drug manufacturer provides indications of added benefit for non-pretreated patients infected with the virus of genotype 2. However, the extent ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Here's another reason to drop that doughnut and hit the treadmill: A new study suggests aerobic fitness affects long-term memory. Michigan State University researchers tested 75 college students during a two-day period and found those who were less fit had a harder time retaining information. "The findings show that lower-fit individuals lose more memory across time," said Kimberly Fenn, study co-author and assistant professor of psychology. The study, which appears online in the research journal Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience, ...

In a new study published today in Cell Reports, scientists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center demonstrate that mice lacking one copy of a gene called CTCF have abnormal DNA methylation and are markedly predisposed to cancer. CTCF is a very well-studied DNA binding protein that exerts a major influence on the architecture of the human genome, but had not been previously linked to cancer. Over 30 years ago, frequent loss of one copy of chromosome 16 was first reported in breast cancer but the gene or genes responsible remained to be identified. Dr. Gala Filippova, ...

New pharmaceuticals to fight autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis, may be identified more effectively by adding genome analysis to standard drug screening, according to a new study by a research team led by UC San Francisco and Harvard researchers, in collaboration with Tempero and GlaxoSmithKlein. In a study reported online April 17, 2014 in the journal Immunity, the scientists combined drug screening with state-of-the-art techniques for analyzing the genome, leading to three small molecules that improved symptoms in a mouse ...

SEATTLE — The United States is among just eight countries in the world to experience an increase in maternal mortality since 2003 – joining Afghanistan and countries in Africa and Central America, according to a new study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. The study, "Global, regional, and national levels and causes of maternal mortality during 1990-2013: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013," published May 2 in The Lancet, ranked the United States number 60 in the list of 180 countries ...

SEATTLE — Since the start of an international effort to address maternal and child mortality, millions of lives have been saved globally, two new studies by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington show. In 2000, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were established by the United Nations to drive maternal and child deaths down by 2015. Child and maternal deaths had been falling in most countries since the 1980s, but the pace accelerated after the goals were set. If countries continue on this course, child deaths will fall ...

Sendai, Japan -- Three-dimentional (3D) nanoporous graphene with preserved 2D Dirac electronic characters was successfully synthesized by Dr. Yoshikazu Ito and Prof. Mingwei CHEN at Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University. The nanoporous graphene is constructed by a single layer graphene sheet that is continuously inter-connected to form a complex 3D network structure. This free-standing nanoporous graphene with an excellent crystallinity possesses high mobility, holding great promise for the applications in electronic devices. The nanoporous ...

The research groups of Janne Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä) and Sebastian Westenhoff (University of Gothenburg) have clarified how the atom structure of bacterial red light photosensors changes when sensing light. The research reveals structural changes in phytochrome protein when illuminated. "The results are a unique demonstration of proteins' ability to structural changes in different phases of their operation. This helps to understand how the biological photosensors function. The modelling and utilisation of protein for other applications becomes much easier ...

Scientists at USC have definitively demonstrated that large sets of variations in the genetic code that do not individually appear to have much effect can collectively produce significant changes in an organism's physical characteristics. Studying the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, USC's Matthew B. Taylor and Ian M. Ehrenreich found that the effects of these genetic variants can depend on four or more other variants in an individual's genome. Most genetic analyses of heritable physical characteristics, including genome-wide association studies in human populations, ...

Obesity increases the risk of myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells that accumulate inside the bones. And with current obesity trends in the United States and especially in South Texas, that's ominous. "I'm predicting an increase in multiple myeloma," said Edward Medina, M.D., Ph.D., "and with the obesity problems we see in the Hispanic population, there could be a serious health disparity on the horizon." Dr. Medina, a hematopathologist and assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, is looking ...

Chicago, IL (May 2, 2014) — International leaders in the fields of gastroenterology and hepatology will gather together for Digestive Disease Week® (DDW) 2014, the largest and most prestigious gastroenterology meeting, from May 3 to 6, 2014, at McCormick Place in Chicago, IL. DDW is jointly sponsored by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) Institute, the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD), the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) and the Society for Surgery of the Alimentary Tract (SSAT). AGA researchers will present ...

It's not only the biology of lakes that varies with the climate and other environmental factors, it's also their chemistry. More knowledge about this is needed to understand the ecology of lakes and their role in the carbon cycle and the climate. Today an international research group led by Uppsala University is publishing a comprehensive study of the composition of organic compounds in the prestigious journal Nature Communications. - Lake water is like a very thin broth with several thousand ingredients in the recipe, all with different properties. At the same time ...

Twenty years ago, Philip Platzman and Allen Mills, Jr. at Bell Laboratories proposed that a gamma-ray laser could be made from a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of positronium, the simplest atom made of both matter and antimatter (1). That was a year before a BEC of any kind of atom was available in any laboratory. Today, BECs have been made of 13 different elements, four of which are available in laboratories of the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) (2), and JQI theorists have turned their attention to prospects for a positronium gamma-ray laser. In a study published ...

Physicists in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University have made several important discoveries regarding the basic structure of mesons—subatomic particles long thought to be composed of one quark and one antiquark and bound together by a strong interaction. Recently, Professor Tomasz Skwarnicki and a team of researchers proved the existence of a meson named Z(4430), with two quarks and two antiquarks, using data from the Large Hadron Collidor beauty (LHCb) Collaboration at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. This tetraquark state was first discovered in Japan ...

Philadelphia, PA, May 1, 2014 – Oily fish are currently recommended as part of a heart healthy diet. This guideline is partially based on the landmark 1970s study from Bang and Dyerberg that connected the low incidence of coronary artery disease (CAD) among the Eskimos of Greenland to their diet, rich in whale and seal blubber. Now, researchers have found that Eskimos actually suffered from CAD at the same rate as their Caucasian counterparts, meaning there is insufficient evidence to back Bang and Dyerberg's claims. Their findings are published in the Canadian Journal ...