Leptin-dependent regulation of reproduction Individuals that lack the adipose-derived hormone leptin fail to complete puberty and are infertile. Leptin-deficient mice recapitulate human phenotypes; however, it is not clear how leptin and leptin signaling impact the reproductive axis. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Vincent Prevot and colleagues at INSERM U837 evaluated leptin deficient animals and determined that leptin acts directly on neurons in the preoptic region of the hypothalamus that synthesize nitric oxide to regulate peripheral levels ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Looking at a smooth sheet of plastic in one University of Illinois laboratory, no one would guess that an impact had recently blasted a hole through it. Illinois researchers have developed materials that not only heal, but regenerate. Until now, self-repairing materials could only bond tiny microscopic cracks. The new regenerating materials fill in large cracks and holes by regrowing material. Led by professor Scott White, the research team comprises professors Jeffry S. Moore and Nancy Sottos and graduate students Brett Krull, Windy Santa Cruz and ...

A Case Western Reserve University student and his mentor have discovered an ancient kitten-sized predator that lived in Bolivia about 13 million years ago—one of the smallest species reported in the extinct order Sparassodonta. Third-year undergraduate student Russell Engelman and Case Western Reserve anatomy professor Darin Croft made the finding by analyzing a partial skull that had been in a University of Florida collection more than three decades. The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02724634.2013.827118#.U2p8-S8njhM. "The ...

A key challenge in the biofuels landscape is to get more advanced biofuels—fuels other than corn ethanol and vegetable oil-based biodiesel—into the transportation pool. Utilization of advanced biofuels is stipulated by the Energy Independence and Security Act; however, current production levels lag behind proposed targets. Additionally, certain transportation sectors, such as aviation, are likely to continue to require liquid hydrocarbon fuels in the long term even as light duty transportation shifts to alternative power sources. A multi-university team lead by George ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- MIT researchers have devised a novel cancer treatment that destroys tumor cells by first disarming their defenses, then hitting them with a lethal dose of DNA damage. In studies with mice, the research team showed that this one-two punch, which relies on a nanoparticle that carries two drugs and releases them at different times, dramatically shrinks lung and breast tumors. The MIT team, led by Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor in Science, and Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor in Engineering, describe the findings in the May 8 online ...

Ozone pollution across the continental United States will become far more difficult to keep in check as temperatures rise, according to new research results. The study shows that Americans face the risk of a 70 percent increase in unhealthy summertime ozone levels by 2050. The results appear online this week in a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, published by the American Geophysical Union. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy. Warmer temperatures and other changes in the atmosphere ...

UPTON, NY—Scientists seeking to understand the intricacies of high-temperature superconductivity—the ability of certain materials to carry electrical current with no energy loss—have been particularly puzzled by a mysterious phase that emerges as charge carriers are added that appears to compete with superconductivity. It's also been a mystery why, within this "pseudogap" phase, the movement of superconducting electrons appears to be restricted to certain directions. So exploring the pseudogap and whether and how it affects the movement of electrons has been a pivotal challenge. ...

A new cultural psychology study has found that psychological differences between the people of northern and southern China mirror the differences between community-oriented East Asia and the more individualistic Western world – and the differences seem to have come about because southern China has grown rice for thousands of years, whereas the north has grown wheat. "It's easy to think of China as a single culture, but we found that China has very distinct northern and southern psychological cultures and that southern China's history of rice farming can explain why people ...

Magnetic devices like hard drives, magnetic random access memories (MRAMs), molecular magnets, and quantum computers depend on the manipulation of magnetic properties. In an atom, magnetism arises from the spin and orbital momentum of its electrons. 'Magnetic anisotropy' describes how an atom's magnetic properties depend on the orientation of the electrons' orbits relative to the structure of a material. It also provides directionality and stability to magnetization. Publishing in Science, researchers led by EPFL combine various experimental and computational methods to ...

Flowers aren't just pretty to look at, they are how plants reproduce. In agricultural plants, the timing and regulation of flower formation has economic significance, affecting a crop's yield. A new paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania published in the journal Science has revealed that a plant hormone once believed to promote flower formation in annual plants also plays a role in inhibiting flowers from forming. The dual role of this hormone, gibberellin, could be exploited to produce higher-yielding crop plants. The study was led by Nobutoshi Yamaguchi ...

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — By simply carrying around their cellphones, patients who suffer from chronic disease could soon have an accurate health monitor that warns their doctors when their symptoms worsen. GaitTrack, an app developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the U. of I. at Chicago, turns a smartphone into a sophisticated medical device. Unlike other apps that merely count steps, GaitTrack uses eight motion parameters to perform a detailed analysis of a person's gait, or walking pattern, which can tell physicians much about a patient's ...

Showing students how to cope with test anxiety might also help them to handle their built-up angst and fretfulness about other issues. The results of a new study by Carl Weems of the University of New Orleans show that anxiety intervention programs that focus on academic matters fit well into the demands of the school routine, and do not carry the same stigma among youth as general anxiety programs do. The research group was among the first to study the effects of Hurricane Katrina on community mental health and anxiety among youths, and the paper appears in Prevention ...

When ovarian cancer spreads from the ovaries it almost always does so to a layer of fatty tissue that lines the gut. A new study has found that ovarian cancer cells are more aggressive on these soft tissues due to the mechanical properties of this environment. The finding is contrary to what is seen with other malignant cancer cells that seem to prefer stiffer tissues. "What we found is that there are some cancer cells that respond to softness as opposed to stiffness," said Michelle Dawson, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering ...

Social work researchers from the University of Washington have found that among a group of active-duty Army personnel who use illicit drugs, the most abused substance is synthetic marijuana, which is harder to detect than other drugs through standard drug tests. The research will be published in the July 2014 issue of Addictive Behaviors, but is already online. Synthetic marijuana, sometimes called "Spice," is made with shredded plant material coated with chemicals that are designed to mimic THC, the psychoactive compound found naturally in marijuana. The U.S. Drug ...

SAN ANTONIO, May 8, 2014 – A new method for isolating and genome sequencing an individual malaria parasite cell has been developed by Texas Biomed researchers and their colleagues. This advance will allow scientists to improve their ability to identify the multiple types of malaria parasites infecting patients and lead to ways to best design drugs and vaccines to tackle this major global killer. Malaria remains the world's deadliest parasitic disease, killing 655,000 people in 2010. Malaria parasite infections are complex and often contain multiple different parasite genotypes ...

Single-cell genomics could provide new insight into the biology of Malaria parasites, including their virulence and levels of drug resistance, to ultimately improve treatment and control of the disease, according to new research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the National Institutes of Health. The findings are revealed in a study by researchers at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute and published today in the journal Genome Research. Malaria infections commonly contain complex mixtures of Plasmodium parasites which cause the disease. These mixtures, known as multiple ...

In a study published today in F1000Research, Professor Kenneth Lee of the Chinese University of Hong Kong reveals the full experimental results of an attempt to replicate a controversial study published in Nature recently that suggested that bathing somatic cells in acid can reprogram them to induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). With systematically collected and fully available data, Lee and his colleagues report that carefully replicating the original acid-treatment method does not induce pluripotency in two types of mouse somatic cells, including those used in ...

A tropical low pressure area known as System 90E is located a couple of hundred miles southwest of Zihuatenejo, Mexico today and was seen by NASA's Terra satellite on its way to a landfall. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboard NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible image of System 90E on May 7 at 18:50 UTC/ 2:50 p.m. EDT as it headed to a landfall in southwestern Mexico. The low appeared disorganized as it approached the southwestern coast of Mexico near the states of Michoacan and Guerrero. According to NOAA's National Hurricane ...

Patients whose own red blood cells are recycled and given back to them during heart surgery have healthier blood cells better able to carry oxygen where it is most needed compared to those who get transfusions of blood stored in a blood bank, according to results of a small study at Johns Hopkins. In a report for the June issue of the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia, the researchers say they found that the more units of banked blood a patient received, the more red cell damage they observed. The damage renders the cells less flexible and less able to squeeze through a ...

Mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes account for nearly 25 percent of hereditary breast cancers and most hereditary ovarian cancers, yet a study by cancer prevention and control researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center suggests an alarmingly small amount of women who qualify for BRCA genetic counseling actually receive the services. Additionally, they found that a significant proportion of women with a family history of breast and ovarian cancer underestimate their own risk. The study, published in the April edition of the Journal of Community ...

A variant of the gene KLOTHO is known for its anti-aging effects in people fortunate enough to carry one copy. Now researchers find that it also has benefits when it comes to brain function. The variant appears to lend beneficial cognitive effects by increasing overall levels of klotho in the bloodstream and brain. What's more, the improvements in learning and memory associated with klotho elevation aren't strictly tied to aging. They do occur in aging mice, but also in young animals, according to a report published in the Cell Press journal Cell Reports on May 8th. ...

Most of us have probably felt that lasting sense of anxiety or even pain after enduring some kind of accident or injury. Now, researchers have the first evidence in any animal that there may be a very good reason for that kind of heightened sensitivity—or at least there is in the battle of squid versus fish. Squid that behave with extra vigilance after experiencing even a minor injury are more likely to live to see another day, according to a report appearing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 8. The findings suggest that behaviors that appear counterproductive ...

The largest metagenomic search for antibiotic resistance genes in the DNA sequences of microbial communities from around the globe has found that bacteria carrying those vexing genes turn up everywhere in nature that scientists look for them. The findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 8 add to evidence showing just how common and abundant those resistance genes really are in natural environments. This big-picture, ecological view on a growing healthcare concern emphasizes the important relationship between antibiotic resistance in the clinic ...

After cancer spreads, finding and destroying malignant cells that circulate in the body is usually critical to patient survival. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Chemistry & Biology have developed a new method that allows investigators to label and track single tumor cells circulating in the blood. This advance could help investigators develop a better understanding of cancer spread and how to stop it. Cancer spread, or metastasis, leads to up to 90% of cancer deaths. Investigators currently do not have the clinical capability to intervene and stop ...

The entire heart muscle in young children may hold untapped potential for regeneration, new research suggests. For decades, scientists believed that after a child's first few days of life, cardiac muscle cells did not divide. Instead, the assumption was that the heart could only grow by having the muscle cells become larger. Cracks were already appearing in that theory. But new findings in mice, scheduled for publication in Cell, provide a dramatic counterexample -- with implications for the treatment of congenital heart disorders in humans. Researchers at Emory University ...