Irvine, Calif., April 9, 2014 — Stem cells culled from bone marrow may prove beneficial in stroke recovery, scientists at UC Irvine's Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center have learned. In an analysis of published research, neurologist Dr. Steven Cramer and biomedical engineer Weian Zhao identified 46 studies that examined the use of mesenchymal stromal cells – a type of multipotent adult stem cells mostly processed from bone marrow – in animal models of stroke. They found MSCs to be significantly better than control therapy in 44 of the studies. Importantly, the ...

It's a guessing game parents like to ponder: What will my child look like when she grows up? A computer could now answer the question in less than a minute. University of Washington researchers have developed software that automatically generates images of a young child's face as it ages through a lifetime. The technique is the first fully automated approach for aging babies to adults that works with variable lighting, expressions and poses. "Aging photos of very young children from a single photo is considered the most difficult of all scenarios, so we wanted to focus ...

MOSS LANDING, CA — When it comes to food, most of the deep sea is a desert. Many seafloor animals feed on marine snow—the organic remnants of algae and animals that live in the sunlit surface waters, far above. However, marine snow only falls as a light dusting and doesn't have much nutritional value. Thus, any other sources of food that reach the deep sea provide a temporary feast. Even bits of dead wood, waterlogged enough to sink, can support thriving communities of specialized animals. A new paper by biologists at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Monterey ...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Picture this: A massive asteroid almost as wide as Rhode Island and about three to five times larger than the rock thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs slams into Earth. The collision punches a crater into the planet's crust that's nearly 500 kilometers (about 300 miles) across: greater than the distance from Washington, D.C. to New York City, and up to two and a half times larger in diameter than the hole formed by the dinosaur-killing asteroid. Seismic waves bigger than any recorded earthquakes shake the planet for about half an hour at any one ...

AUDIO: This is a typical one minute recording of an active Cory's Shearwater colony on the island of Corvo in the North Atlantic Ocean, June 2011. Click here for more information. Seabirds nest in places that are inaccessible for most humans - vertical cliffs and remote islands surrounded by raging waves. Worse still, many seabirds lay their eggs in burrows or cavities where they are protected from inclement weather and invisible for researchers. Hidden under rocks or in burrows ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Rabbits that remain indoors may suffer from a lack of vitamin D, researchers report in a new study. In rabbits kept as pets or used in laboratory studies, the deficiency could lead to dental problems, undermine their cardiovascular health, weaken their immune systems and skew scientific findings. The study found that regular exposure to artificial ultraviolet B light for two weeks doubled rabbits' serum vitamin D levels – an increase not seen in animals raised in artificial light lacking UVB radiation. Future studies will seek to determine optimal levels ...

On the less glamorous side of space exploration, there's the more practical problem of waste — in particular, what to do with astronaut pee. But rather than ejecting it into space, scientists are developing a new technique that can turn this waste burden into a boon by converting it into fuel and much-needed drinking water. Their report, which could also inspire new ways to treat municipal wastewater, appears in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. Eduardo Nicolau, Carlos R. Cabrera and colleagues point out that human waste on long-term journeys into ...

While many people have an opinion on whether animals can help to improve wellbeing and care for patients in hospitals, does anyone really know whether there are benefits both for the patients and the animals themselves? Not according to a team of researchers from the University of Adelaide, which has conducted a worldwide review of all studies looking at the impact of "animal interventions" in healthcare settings for children. The researchers, from the University's School of Psychology and School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, have found that despite theories emerging ...

NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over the remnants of Tropical Depression Peipah on April 9 as the storm slowly approached the Philippines from the east. According to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, Peipah is now not expected to make landfall in eastern Visayas until April 12. The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite or VIIRS instrument aboard Suomi NPP captured a visible, high-resolution image of the storm as it continued moving through the Philippine Sea. The storm appeared disorganized in the image, and the center was difficult to pinpoint on the visible ...

In the fight against "superbugs," scientists have discovered a class of agents that can make some of the most notorious strains vulnerable to the same antibiotics that they once handily shrugged off. The report on the promising agents called metallopolymers appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Chuanbing Tang and colleagues note that the antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) is responsible for a significant fraction of the infections that patients acquire in hospitals. According to the Centers for ...

Hearing loss affects 36 million Americans to some degree, often leaving them feeling isolated, but it has received little attention from the pharmaceutical industry — until now. Small firms have brought a handful of potential therapies to the development pipeline, and pharmaceutical heavyweights are taking notice, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society. The story states that the most common cause of hearing loss is loud noise, either from a single event like the bang of a firecracker or from ...

This news release is available in French. The French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) is currently the leading biomedical research organisation in Europe, and plays a key role in developing European research. To mark its 50th anniversary, Inserm wanted to assess the perceptions of Europeans regarding biomedical research. To create this European panorama, Ipsos carried out an Internet survey of over 4,000 Europeans (with 1,001 French, 1,004 German, 1,001 Italians and 1,005 British respondents) from 10 to 23 January 2014. Representative samples ...

JILA researchers have engineered a short, flexible, reusable probe for the atomic force microscope (AFM) that enables state-of-the-art precision and stability in picoscale force measurements. Shorter, softer and more agile than standard and recently enhanced AFM probes, the JILA tips will benefit nanotechnology and studies of folding and stretching in biomolecules such as proteins and DNA. An AFM probe is a cantilever, shaped like a tiny diving board with a small, atomic-scale point on the free end. To measure forces at the molecular scale in a liquid, the probe attaches ...

As unlikely as it sounds, green tomatoes may hold the answer to bigger, stronger muscles. Using a screening method that previously identified a compound in apple peel as a muscle-boosting agent, a team of University of Iowa scientists has now discovered that tomatidine, a compound from green tomatoes, is even more potent for building muscle and protecting against muscle atrophy. Muscle atrophy, or wasting, is caused by aging and a variety of illnesses and injuries, including cancer, heart failure, and orthopedic injuries, to name a few. It makes people weak and fatigued, ...

About 100.000 thyroid operations are performed in Germany each year, a large percentage of them for the treatment of benign thyroid disease (euthyroid nodular goiter). In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2014; 111 (10): 161-8), Nada Rayes and colleagues suggest a paradigm shift in the treatment of such lesions. The article is accompanied by an editorial by Roland Gärtner. Radical surgery has become much more common in the past few years and has been motivated by a desire to prevent recurrences. From 2006 to 2008, the percentage ...

This news release is available in German. When Liberia enters the news it is usually in the context of civil war, economic crisis, poverty or a disease outbreak such as the recent emergence of Ebola in West Africa. Liberia's status as a biodiversity hotspot and the fact that it is home to some of the last viable and threatened wildlife populations in West Africa has received little media attention in the past. This is partly because the many years of violent conflict in Liberia, from 1989 to 1997 and from 2002 to 2003, thwarted efforts of biologists to conduct biological ...

Small financial incentives, totalling as little as £30, can dramatically increase the likelihood of people who inject drugs completing a course of hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccination, according to new research published in The Lancet. Researchers in the UK found that people undergoing treatment for heroin addiction who received a maximum total of £30 supermarket vouchers in equal or graduated instalments in return for full compliance with a regimen of three HBV vaccine injections were at least 12 times as likely to complete the course within 28 days compared to those ...

Washington, DC — New research appearing in the April 9 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience highlights the important role sleep plays in strengthening and maintaining the accuracy of a memory and hints at why the brain shuts out sensory information during periods of deep sleep. The study found that introducing new odor information to an animal while it sleeps compromises its ability to remember the difference between new and previously encountered smells while awake. During sleep, the brain performs a number of important repair and maintenance duties that are necessary ...

Humans are unique in their ability to acquire language. But how? A new study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences shows that we are in fact born with the basic fundamental knowledge of language, thus shedding light on the age-old linguistic "nature vs. nurture" debate. THE STUDY While languages differ from each other in many ways, certain aspects appear to be shared across languages. These aspects might stem from linguistic principles that are active in all human brains. A natural question then arises: are infants born with knowledge of how ...

The California condor was one of the first species to be listed under the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1966 when the population was reduced to a handful of birds. Through a massive collaborative effort that included fieldwork and breeding in zoos, the condor population has grown to more than 400 birds, more than half of which are now free-flying in the wild. Unfortunately, there is overwhelming evidence that lead poisoning from accidental ingestion of spent ammunition is the leading cause of death in the wild population, and this may prevent the establishment ...

In the study published today in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (JCI), one of the journals with highest impact in experimental medicine, the researchers associate the activity of the DOR protein with muscle atrophy and point to DOR as a plausible target against which to develop a drug to prevent muscle deterioration in certain diseases. DOR (Diabetes- and Obesity-regulated gene), also known as TP53INP2, is a protein involved in autophagy, a quality control process that ensures cells stay healthy. The researchers have found that increased DOR expression in the muscle ...

April 9, 2014 The push and pull of physical force can cause profound changes in the behavior of a cell. Two studies from researchers working at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center reveal how cells respond to mechanical manipulation, a key factor in addressing the underlying causes of cancer and other diseases. The studies, published in Nature Cell Biology and the Journal of Immunology, have their roots in a longtime partnership between the labs of Keith Burridge, PhD, Kenan Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology in the UNC School of Medicine, and Richard ...

WASHINGTON, DC, April 9, 2014 — The punishing psychological toll endured by military personnel in war zones has been extensively documented for years by researchers, perhaps more than ever in the wake of recent military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there has been a troubling dearth of research examining the mental health toll exacted on the large numbers of civilians who work with the military in war zones. Sociologists Alex Bierman, an assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and Ryan Kelty, an associate professor at Washington College in Maryland, ...

Singapore, 9 April 2014 – Assistant Professor Christian A. Nijhuis of the Department of Chemistry at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Faculty of Science, in collaboration with researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), namely Dr Bai Ping of the Institute of High Performance Computing and Dr Michel Bosman of the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering has successfully designed and fabricated electrical circuits that can operate at hundreds of terahertz frequencies, which is tens of thousands times faster than today's state-of-the-art ...

Physical function and sense of autonomy are independent determinants of life-space mobility in older people. This was found in a study conducted at the Gerontology Research Center of the University of Jyväskylä. In this project, 848 older men and women that lived independently in the Jyväskylä region in Central Finland were interviewed at their own home. Life-space mobility reflects a person's mobility with or without the use of a vehicle. Life-space mobility reflects an individual's opportunities to participate in the society. An individual's life-space may be restricted ...