Extremely premature babies in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) had fewer infections when medical staff wore gloves after washing their hands compared with hand washing alone. The author is David A. Kaufman, M.D., of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, and colleagues. Late-onset infections (more than 72 hours after birth) and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC, tissue death in the intestines) can cause death and neurodevelopmental impairment in extremely premature babies. Even after hand washing, medical staff can still have microorganisms ...

A 40-year-old California man exhibits normal cognitive function although he has no apolipoprotein E (apoE), which is believed to be important for brain function but a mutation of which is also a known risk factor for Alzheimer disease (AD). Researchers suggest this could mean that therapies to reduce apoE in the central nervous system may one day help treat neurodegenerative disorders such as AD. The study was authored by Angel C. Y. Mak, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues. The patient was referred to UCSF with severe high cholesterol ...

An analysis of data from two randomized clinical trials finds that three to four years of treatment with bisphosphonates to improve bone density is not linked to reduced risk of invasive postmenopausal breast cancer. The authors are Trisha F. Hue, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues. Some studies have suggested that bisphosphonates, which are commonly used to treat osteoporosis, may have antitumor and antimetastatic properties. Some observational studies have suggested bisphosphonates may protect women from breast cancer. ...

DALLAS – Aug. 11, 2014 – Two years ago, the parents of Chloe Olivarez watched painfully as their daughter experienced epileptic seizures hundreds of times a day. The seizures, caused by a rare metabolic disease that depleted her brain of needed glucose, left Chloe nearly unresponsive, and slow to develop. Within hours, treatment with an edible oil dramatically reduced the number of seizures for then-4-year-old Chloe, one of 14 participants in a small UT Southwestern Medical Center clinical trial. "Immediately we noticed fewer seizures. From the Chloe we knew two years ...

Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes malaria, has proven notoriously resistant to scientists' efforts to study its genetics. It can take up to a year to determine the function of a single gene, which has slowed efforts to develop new, more targeted drugs and vaccines. MIT biological engineers have now demonstrated that a new genome-editing technique, called CRISPR, can disrupt a single parasite gene with a success rate of up to 100 percent — in a matter of weeks. This approach could enable much more rapid gene analysis and boost drug-development efforts, says ...

West Orange, NJ. August 11, 2014. Kessler Foundation researchers have identified an association between the built environment and disability-related outcomes for adults with physical impairments. The article, Disability and the built environment: an investigation of community and neighborhood land uses and participation for physically impaired adults, was published in the July issue of Annals of Epidemiology (doi: 10.1016/j.annepidem.2014.05.003). The authors are Amanda Botticello, PhD, MPH, and Nicole Cobbold, BS, of Kessler Foundation, and Tanya Rohrbach, MS, of Raritan ...

MADISON, Wis. — When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show global temperature trends over the last 10,000 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Zhengyu Liu knew that was going to be a problem. "We have been building models and there are now robust contradictions," says Liu, a professor in the UW-Madison Center for Climatic Research. "Data from observation says global cooling. The physical model says it has to be warming." Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences today, ...

Scientists hunting for life beyond Earth have discovered more than 1,800 planets outside our solar system, or exoplanets, in recent years, but so far, no one has been able to confirm an exomoon. Now, physicists from The University of Texas at Arlington believe following a trail of radio wave emissions may lead them to that discovery. Their recent findings, published in the Aug. 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, describe radio wave emissions that result from the interaction between Jupiter's magnetic field and its moon Io. They suggest using detailed calculations about ...

In An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses, published in 1785, Sir William Withering cautioned readers that extracts from the plant foxglove, also called digitalis, was not a perfect drug. "Time will fix the real value upon this discovery," he wrote. Now, more than 200 years later, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have validated Withering's warning with the discovery that patients with atrial fibrillation — a rapid and irregular heart rhythm — who are treated with the digitalis-derivative digoxin are more likely to die than similar ...

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, Mass. (August 11, 2014) --The human brain remains one of the least understood organs in the human body, because of its complexity and the difficulty of studying its physiology in the living body. Tufts University researchers today announced development of the first reported complex three-dimensional model made of brain-like cortical tissue that exhibits biochemical and electrophysiological responses and can function in the laboratory for months. The engineered tissue model offers new options for studying brain function, disease and trauma, and treatment. ...

It has been linked to a recently discovered mechanism: the trapping of giant waves in the atmosphere. A new data analysis now shows that such wave-trapping events are indeed on the rise. "The large number of recent high-impact extreme weather events has struck and puzzled us," says Dim Coumou, lead author of the study conducted by a team of scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). "Of course we are warming our atmosphere by emitting CO2 from fossil fuels, but the increase in devastating heat waves in regions like Europe or the US seems ...

Scientists believe babies are born with digestive systems containing few or no bacteria. Their guts then quickly become colonized by microbes — good and bad — as they nurse or take bottles, receive medication and even as they are passed from one adoring relative to another. However, in infants born prematurely, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the population of bacteria in babies' gastrointestinal tracts may depend more on their biological makeup and gestational age at birth than on environmental factors. The scientists ...

Bioengineers have created three-dimensional brain-like tissue that functions like and has structural features similar to tissue in the rat brain and that can be kept alive in the lab for more than two months. As a first demonstration of its potential, researchers used the brain-like tissue to study chemical and electrical changes that occur immediately following traumatic brain injury and, in a separate experiment, changes that occur in response to a drug. The tissue could provide a superior model for studying normal brain function as well as injury and disease, and ...

LA JOLLA, CA – August 11, 2014 – It's a trick any cat burglar knows: to open a locked door, slide a credit card past the latch. Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) tried a similar strategy when they attempted to disrupt the function of MYC, a cancer regulator thought to be "undruggable." The researchers found that a credit card-like molecule they developed somehow moves in and disrupts the critical interactions between MYC and its binding partner. The research, published the week of August 11 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ...

VIDEO: The new rendering of the protein-DNA complex, or machine, that the Lambda virus uses to insert its DNA into that of its E. coli host. Click here for more information. For half a century biologists have studied the way that the lambda virus parks DNA in the chromosome of a host E. coli bacterium and later extracts it as a model reaction of genetic recombination. But for all that time, they could never produce an overall depiction of the protein-DNA machines that carry out ...

Native bacteria living inside mosquitoes prevent the insects from passing Wolbachia bacteria -- which can make the mosquitoes resistant to the malaria parasite -- to their offspring, according to a team of researchers. The team found that Asaia, a type of bacteria that occurs naturally in Anopheles mosquitoes, blocks invasion of Wolbachia into the mosquitoes' germlines -- the cells that are passed on through successive generations of an organism -- thus stopping the insects from transmitting Wolbachia to their offspring. "Wolbachia infects up to 70 percent of all known ...

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Researchers at UC Davis, City of Hope, Taipai Medical University and National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan have discovered how a drug that deprives the cells of a key amino acid specifically kills cancer cells. Their paper, published today in Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences, is the culmination of nearly a decade of research into the role of arginine – and its deprivation – in the generation of excessive autophagy, a process in which the cell dies by eating itself. Study co-author Hsing-Jien Kung, a renowned cancer biologist and ...

VIDEO: This is an animation of the growth and development of the extinct rangeomorph species Beothukis mistakenis, which lived during the Ediacaran Period from approximately 575 to 555 million years ago.... Click here for more information. A bizarre group of uniquely shaped organisms known as rangeomorphs may have been some of the earliest animals to appear on Earth, uniquely suited to ocean conditions 575 million years ago. A new model devised by researchers at the University ...

A study led by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers found that injecting a vaccine-like compound into mice was effective in protecting them from malaria. The findings suggest a potential new path toward the elusive goal of malaria immunization. Mice, injected with a virus genetically altered to help the rodents create an antibody designed to fight the malaria parasite, produced high levels of the anti-malaria antibody. The approach, known as Vector immunoprophylaxis, or VIP, has shown promise in HIV studies but has never been tested with malaria, ...

Winston-Salem, N.C. – August 11, 2014 – Taking advantage of technology that can analyze tissue samples and measure the activity of thousands of genes at once, scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are on a mission to better understand and treat interstitial cystitis (IC), a painful and difficult-to-diagnose bladder condition. "We are looking for molecular biomarkers for IC, which basically means we are comparing bladder biopsy tissue from patients with suspected interstitial cystitis to patients without the disease. The goal is to identify factors that will ...

A team of clinician researchers has discovered a highly virulent, multidrug resistant form of the pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, in patient samples in Ohio. Their investigation suggests that the particular genetic element involved, which is still rare in the United States, has been spreading heretofore unnoticed, and that surveillance is urgently needed. The research is published ahead of print in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The P. aeruginosa contained a gene for a drug resistant enzyme called a metallo beta-lactamase. Beta-lactamases enable broad-spectrum ...

Recent research has suggested that women play better with others in small working groups, and that adding women to a group is a surefire way to boost team collaboration and creativity. But a new study from Washington University in St. Louis finds that this is only true when women work on teams that aren't competing against each other. Force teams to go head to head and the benefits of a female approach evaporate. "Intergroup competition is a double-edged sword that ultimately provides an advantage to groups and units composed predominantly or exclusively of men, while ...

A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Idaho State University (ISU) explored how habitat alterations, including the addition of energy transmission towers, affect avian predators nesting in sagebrush landscapes. Researchers compared nesting habitat selection between Common Ravens and three raptor species commonly found in sagebrush ecosystems: Red-tailed Hawks, Swainson's Hawks, and Ferruginous Hawks. Using the data from their field research and reviewing historical data from other studies, the scientists developed ...

Empathy is important for navigating complex social situations, and is considered a highly desirable trait. Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, discussed how exposure to narrative fiction may improve our ability to understand what other people are thinking or feeling in his session at the American Psychological Association's 122nd Annual Convention. Exposure to stories Many stories are about people--their mental states, their relationships—even stories with inanimate objects, may have human-like characteristics. Mar explains that we understand stories ...

The Central Pacific Hurricane Center has issued its 30th warning on Julio today at 1500 GMT. Julio's position at this point is 395 miles northeast of Honolulu, Hawaii moving northwest at 8 knots per hour. Julio is moving toward the northwest near 9 mph, 15 km/h. Maximum sustained winds are near 75 mph, 120 km/h, with higher gusts. Julio is expected to weaken slightly over the next 48 hours, down to tropical storm strength by tonight. At present, hurricane force winds extend outward up to 25 miles, 35 km, from the center, and tropical storm force winds extend outward ...