Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have headed a study that provides new knowledge about the EphA2 receptor, which is significant in several forms of cancer. This is important knowledge in itself – but just as important is how this study, which is published in the highly respected journal Nature Methods, was conducted. The researchers used the method of DNA origami, in which a DNA molecule is shaped into a nanostructure, and used these structures to test theories about cell signalling. It was previously known that the EphA2 receptor played a part in several ...

Researchers at the University of Birmingham, UK, led by Dr. Ben Scheven, Dr. Wendy Leadbeater and Ben Mead have discovered that stem cells isolated from the teeth, termed dental pulp stem cells (DPSC), can protect retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) from death following injury and promote regeneration of their axons along the optic nerve. RGC loss is the leading cause of blindness and can arise through traumatic injury or degenerative diseases such as glaucoma. Neurotrophic factors (NTFs), which travel along the axon of a neuron to a cell body act as survival signals however, ...

Cerebral ischemia not only injuries neurons, but also involves the glial cells that provide a supportive scaffold to which the neurons are attached and the microvessels that provide energy for nervous tissue. Therefore, protection of a single neuron is not sufficient to recover nervous function, and more attention should be paid to maintenance of the function of entire neurovascular units. Houshiheisan compound is one of effective traditional Chinese compound prescriptions for stroke. The prescription is composed of wind-dispelling (chrysanthemun flower, divaricate saposhnikovia ...

Techniques for controlling ultra-cold atoms travelling in ring traps currently represent an important research area in physics. A new study gives a proof of principle, confirmed by numerical simulations, of the applicability to ultra-cold atoms of a very efficient and robust transport technique called spatial adiabatic passage (SAP). Yu Loiko from the University of Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have, for the first time, applied SAP to inject, extract, and filter the velocity of neutral atoms from and into a ring trap. Such traps are key to improving our understanding ...

Scientists from North Carolina State University and the University of Florida have combined cookies, citizen science and robust research methods to track the diversity of ant species across the United States, and are now collaborating with international partners to get a global perspective on how ants are moving and surviving in the modern world. "We think our School of Ants project serves as a good model for how citizen science can be used to collect more data, more quickly, from more places than a research team could do otherwise," says Dr. Andrea Lucky, a researcher ...

Age limits on clinical trials need to be more flexible to allow more teenage cancer patients the chance to access new treatments, according to a report from the National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI), published in the Lancet Oncology. The study, funded by the National Institute for Health Research and Teenage Cancer Trust, found that trials designed with broader age limits resulted in more teenagers and young adults going on clinical trials. The study showed this recommendation led to a 13 per cent rise in 15-19 year old cancer patients taking part in clinical trials ...

(PHILADELPHIA) -- In the largest study to date comparing sutures (stitches) versus surgical staples for closing a C-section, researchers found a 57 percent decrease in wound complications in women who were sutured versus those who received staples. By carefully addressing the concerns that previous studies had raised, the research shows a clear benefit of suture for women. "There has been ongoing debate in the field about the use of sutures versus staples," says senior author Vincenzo Berghella, M.D., director of Maternal Fetal Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics ...

(BRYAN, Texas) — A new test for tuberculosis (TB) could dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of diagnosis for one of the world's deadliest diseases, enabling health care providers to report results to patients within minutes, according to a study published this week in the journal Angewandte Chemie. Jeffrey Cirillo, Ph.D., professor at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine, in collaboration with GBDbio, a Texas A&M spinoff company, and investigators at Stanford University, have identified a new chemical compound to spot the bacteria that cause ...

Alicia Boole Stott, the third daughter of mathematician George Boole, is probably best known for establishing the term "polytope" for a convex solid in four dimensions. Alicia was also a long time collaborator of HSM Coxeter, one of the greatest geometers of the 20th Century. Platonic solids are regular bodies in three dimensions, such as the cube and icosahedron, and have been known for millennia. They feature prominently in the natural world wherever geometry and symmetry are important, for instance in lattices and quasi-crystals, as well as fullerenes and viruses (see ...

This news release is available in French. Scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University and McGill University Health Centre have shown that a member of the protein family known as SUMO (small ubiquitin-like modifier) is a key to why tumour cells multiply uncontrollably, especially in the case of glioblastoma. The SUMO family proteins modify other proteins and the SUMOylation of proteins are critical for many cellular processes. Identifying SUMO's role in the cancer cell growth will lead to a new strategy for glioblastoma treatment. ...

VIDEO: On July 3, NASA's TRMM satellite passed over Arthur and saw intense bands of thunderstorms north of Arthur's well defined eye dropping rainfall at a rate of over 98.4 mm... Click here for more information. Hurricane Arthur made landfall in North Carolina on July 3, and today, July 4, it is bringing its own fireworks along the Mid-Atlantic and New England states. Those fireworks were in the form of "hot towers," powerful, high thunderstorms with heavy rainfall that indicate ...

The 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting ended with a panel discussion entitled "Science for the benefit of mankind" on Mainau Island, Lake Constance, Germany, today." 37 Nobel laureates and more than 600 selected young scientists from 80 countries had participated in the week-long meeting in the Bavarian city of Lindau since last Sunday. A boat trip to Mainau at the invitation of the State of Baden-Württemberg marked the finish of the programme which was devoted to medicine and physiology. In 1895 Alfred Nobel determined in his will that the Nobel Prizes shall be awarded ...

Institute for Basic Science (IBS), the main organization of the International Science and Business Belt project in South Korea, has announced that a group of researchers, led by professor Won Do Heo, have developed a new technology in the field of optogenetics that can remotely control specific receptors by light. They have named this new technology "OptoTrk" and it has succeeded with neuronal differentiation inducement. The most significant feature of OptoTrk technology is that it requires only light to activate neuronal functions without the need of other substances. ...

The PandaX experiment of China, which is located in the deepest underground laboratory, has released its technical design report recently. The full article will appear in SCIENCE CHINA Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy, 2014, 57(8): 1476-1494. The Particle and Astrophysical Xenon (PandaX) collaboration was established in 2009 and mainly supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education in China， the Natural Science Foundation of China，and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The experiment is suitable for both direct dark matter detection ...

RENO – Every year, wildfires clear millions of hectares of land and emit around 34-percent of global soot mass into the atmosphere. In certain regions, such as Southeast Asia and Russia, these fires can contribute as much as 63-percent of regional soot mass. In a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports, a team of scientists led by Rajan Chakrabarty from Nevada's Desert Research Institute report the observation of a previously unrecognized form of soot particle, identified by the authors as "superaggregates," from wildfire emissions. These newly identified particles ...

Insights into how cells move through the body could lead to innovative techniques to stop cancer cells from spreading and causing secondary tumours, according to new UCL research. Scientists discovered that cells can change into an invasive, liquid-like state to readily navigate the narrow channels in our body. This transformation is triggered by chemical signals, which could be blocked in order to stop cancer cells from spreading. Most cancer deaths are not due to primary tumours, but to secondary tumours in vital organs, such as the lungs or brain, caused by cells ...

Some viruses can hide in our bodies for decades. They make 'fake' human proteins that trick our immune cells into thinking 'everything is awesome', there's nothing to see here. Now researchers at the Imaging Centre of Excellence at Monash and Melbourne Universities have determined the basic structure of one of the two known families of these deceptive proteins. Using synchrotron light and working with a common virus that lives in people happily and for the most part harmlessly, they worked out the structure of the fake proteins. This is an important first step towards ...

A team of scientists from the Cancer Science Institute of Singapore (CSI Singapore) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) discovered that a protein named IL23A is part of our stomach's defence against bacterial infection which leads to gastric cancer. This finding could potentially be used to combat the deadly disease. The research group, led by Professor Yoshiaki Ito, Senior Principal Investigator at CSI Singapore, also showed that the production of IL23A by stomach cells requires the tumour suppressor gene, RUNX3, which is frequently silenced in gastric cancer. ...

The equivalent of one-third of Melbourne's water use could be saved each year through the implementation of efficiency measures that deal with climate change, according to a new study. Researchers at the Monash Sustainability Institute analysed the water-saving potential of 74 options for reducing greenhouse gas emissions identified in ClimateWorks Australia's award-winning Low Carbon Growth Plan for Australia. The research was published this week in Springer's international journal Climatic Change. Monash University Research Fellow Dr Philip Wallis said an analysis ...

As in humans, cancers in dogs have complex causes. The interaction of the environment, food, and genetic disposition are the most well known factors. Today nearly all methods of human medicine are basically available for dogs with cancer, but this was not true of cancer immunotherapy so far. So-called cancer immunotherapy - which is the treatment of tumors by the use of antibodies - has been established and used very successfully in human medicine for about 20 years. Since cancer cells bear very specific antigens on the surface, the corresponding antibodies bind to these ...

The genus Axinaea belongs to the large, mainly tropical flowering plant family Melastomataceae (Meadow Beauty Family). Most of the ca. 5000 species in the family rely on bees for their pollination. Only about 100 are known to be pollinated by other insects or vertebrates. The flowers of Axinaea appear in clusters of few to more than twenty flowers and the petals of the different species are pink, yellow, orange or red. The stamens (male reproductive organs) stand out based on the contrasting colours of their bulbous appendages. The pollination mechanism of Axinaea had never ...

Alas, the thankless pseudogene. Dysfunctional, unloved and seemingly of little use, these poor-cousin relatives of genes have lost their protein-coding abilities. They contain material not essential for an organism's survival and are the "last stop" for removal of genomic waste. Not any more. The pseudogene's day may have arrived thanks to scientists at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Han Liang, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the Cancer Center is advancing knowledge of these ...

New York, NY – July 7, 2014 - While cigarette use is declining precipitously among youth, evidence indicates that American adolescents are turning to ethnically-linked alternative tobacco products, such as hookahs, cigars, and various smokeless tobacco products, according to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Now a new study by researchers affiliated with New York University's Center for Drug Use and HIV Research (CDUHR), in the August 2014 edition of Pediatrics identifies how prevalent Hookah use is and which teens are most likely ...

Boulder, Colo., USA – A trio of paleontologists has discovered a remarkable new tracksite in Alaska's Denali National Park filled with duck-billed dinosaur footprints -- technically referred to as hadrosaurs -- that demonstrates they not only lived in multi-generational herds but thrived in the ancient high-latitude, polar ecosystem. The paper provides new insight into the herd structure and paleobiology of northern polar dinosaurs in an arctic greenhouse world. The article, "Herd structure in Late Cretaceous polar dinosaurs: A remarkable new dinosaur tracksite, Denali ...

Babies' growth in the womb and their size at birth, especially their length, are strikingly similar the world over – when babies are born to healthy, well-educated and well-nourished mothers. That's the finding of a landmark international study, INTERGROWTH-21st, led by Oxford University researchers, which involved almost 60,000 pregnancies in eight defined urban areas in Brazil, China, India, Italy, Kenya, Oman, the UK and USA. Worldwide there are wide disparities in the average size of babies at birth. This has significant consequences for future health, as small ...