(SALT LAKE CITY)—University of Utah researchers have found that deficiency of an antioxidant response protein called nuclear erythroid-2 like factor-2 (Nrf2) delays or prevents hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a type of a heart failure in which the heart muscle grows abnormally thick. This new finding, published in the Oct. 1, 2013, issue of Cardiovascular Research, suggests that restoring the normal balance of reduction-oxidation chemical reactions in the body could prevent heart disease and other conditions caused by reductive stress. Nuclear erythroid-2 like factor-2 ...

US research reveals that 4 out of 5 college student drivers have used their cell phones to send or receive text messages while driving despite the majority recognizing that the activity represents a risk. Garold Lantz and Sandra Loeb of the McGowan School of Business, at King's College, in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, found that male drivers are more likely to engage in texting while driving but consider themselves more proficient drivers than others and so less likely to endanger themselves or others while doing so. Analysis indicates 'texting impulsiveness' is positively ...

Washington, DC (October 10, 2013) — In the United States, Hispanics with kidney failure are less likely than non-Hispanic whites to receive a kidney transplant largely due to their blood type and because of where they live, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The findings highlight the need to implement new deceased donor organ allocation policies that distribute organs over wider geographic areas to help reduce barriers to transplantation for Hispanics. Hispanics represent the ...

Washington, DC (October 10, 2013) — Among younger kidney transplant recipients, a disproportionate number of African Americans and individuals with less education receive organs that are of lower quality or are considered marginal, according to a study appearing in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN). The findings suggest that there are racial and social disparities in the allocation of transplanted organs that need to be addressed. Older kidney disease patients who have a high risk of dying while on dialysis may benefit ...

Astrophysicists have found the first evidence of a water-rich rocky planetary body outside our solar system in its shattered remains orbiting a white dwarf. A new study by scientists at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge published in the journal Science analysed the dust and debris surrounding the white dwarf star GD61 170 light years away. Using observations obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and the large Keck telescope on Hawaii, they found an excess of oxygen – a chemical signature that indicates that the debris had once been part of a bigger body originally ...

Astronomers have found the shattered remains of an asteroid that contained huge amounts of water orbiting an exhausted star, or white dwarf. This suggests that the star GD 61 and its planetary system – located about 150 light years away and at the end of its life – had the potential to contain Earth-like exoplanets, they say. This is the first time that both water and a rocky surface - two "key ingredients" for habitable planets - have been found together beyond our solar system. Earth is essentially a 'dry' planet, with only 0.02% of its mass as surface water, so oceans ...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine have identified 13 metabolites – small molecules produced by cellular metabolism – that are significantly different in patients with diabetes and chronic kidney disease compared to healthy controls. Twelve of the 13 metabolites are linked to mitochondrial function, suggesting that suppression of mitochondria – the powerhouses of cells – is a fundamental characteristic of diabetic kidney disease. The findings are published in the November edition of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. "This ...

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Scientists have a promising new approach to combating deadly human viruses thanks to an educated hunch by University of California, Riverside microbiology professor Shou-Wei Ding, and his 20 years of research on plants, fruit flies, nematodes and mice to prove his theory true. Researchers led by Ding, who heads a lab in UC Riverside's Institute for Integrative Genome Biology, have discovered that, like plants and invertebrate animals, mammals use the RNA interference (RNAi) process to destroy viruses within their own cells. Their findings will be ...

Ancient DNA recovered from a time series of skeletons in Germany spanning 4,000 years of prehistory has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern-day Europeans. The study, published today in Science, reveals dramatic population changes with waves of prehistoric migration, not only from the accepted path via the Near East, but also from Western and Eastern Europe. The research was a collaboration between the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), at the University of Adelaide, researchers from the University of Mainz, the State Heritage ...

Jülich, 10 October 2013 – The human brain keeps changing throughout a person's lifetime. New connections are continually created while synapses that are no longer in use degenerate. To date, little is known about the mechanisms behind these processes. Jülich neuroinformatician Dr. Markus Butz has now been able to ascribe the formation of new neural networks in the visual cortex to a simple homeostatic rule that is also the basis of many other self-regulating processes in nature. With this explanation, he and his colleague Dr. Arjen van Ooyen from Amsterdam also provide ...

Scientists in Norwich and China have, for the first time, uncovered exactly how an immune receptor mediating plants' natural immunity to bacteria works. The research has important implications for developing broad-spectrum disease resistance in crops. UK researchers at The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, in a close collaboration with Chinese scientists at Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing have shared their findings in a paper published this week in Science. TSL senior scientist Prof. Cyril Zipfel said: "Plants, like humans, have an ...

(Boston) -- Researchers from Boston University Schools of Medicine (BUSM) and Public Health (BUSPH) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) have found that high-risk travelers account for nearly 20 percent of patients using the five clinics of the Boston Area Travel Medicine Network (BATMN). The study, which appears online in Mayo Clinic Proceedings, also found that these travelers often visited destinations with malaria and typhoid risk. In 2010, an estimated 935 million travelers crossed international borders, including 28.5 million from the U.S. Certain travelers are at greater ...

The iron in the Earth's inner core weakens dramatically before it melts, explaining the unusual properties that exist in the moon-sized solid centre of our planet that have, up until now, been difficult to understand. Scientists use seismic waves - pulses of energy generated during earthquakes - to measure what is happening in the Earth's inner core, which at 6000 km beneath our feet is completely inaccessible. Problematically for researchers, the results of seismic measurements consistently show that these waves move through the Earth's solid inner core at much slower ...

What's in a kiss? A study by Oxford University researchers suggests kissing helps us size up potential partners and, once in a relationship, may be a way of getting a partner to stick around. 'Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture,' says Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. 'Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used. ...

Boston, Mass., October 10, 2013 – A research team from Dana-Farber/Boston Children's Cancer and Blood Disorders Center and other institutions has discovered a new genetic target for potential therapy of sickle cell disease (SCD). The target, called an enhancer, controls a molecular switch in red blood cells called BCL11A that, in turn, regulates hemoglobin production. The researchers—led by Daniel Bauer, MD, PhD, and Stuart Orkin, MD, of Dana-Farber/Boston Children's—reported their findings today in Science. Prior work by Orkin and others has shown that when flipped ...

Hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or were absorbed into the farming population. In a paper published today in Science, researchers describe their analysis of DNA and isotopes from human bones found in the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. The team, led by anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany, used stable isotopes to determine their diet, DNA ...

A study to assess whether patients prescribed smoking cessation drugs are at an increased risk of suicide, self-harm and treated depression compared with users of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) has found no evidence of an increased risk. The findings, led by researchers from the University of Bristol, are published online in the British Medical Journal [BMJ] today [11 October]. Varenicline (brand name Champix in the UK, Chantix in the US) is widely used by patients seeking to stop smoking with recent figures showing there were one million prescriptions for the drug ...

Many viral infections are nipped in the bud by the innate immune response. This involves specific proteins within the infected cell that recognize the virus and trigger a signalling cascade – the so-called interferon response. This activates a protective mechanism in neighbouring cells and often results in the death of the primarily infected cell. In plants and invertebrates another mechanism is known to function in antiviral immune response: the so-called RNA interference (RNAi) pathway. RNAi uses an intermediate of the viral proliferation process to build a weapon against ...

Indigenous hunter-gatherers and immigrant farmers lived side-by-side for more than 2,000 years in Central Europe, before the hunter-gatherer communities died out or adopted the agricultural lifestyle. The results come from a study undertaken by the Institute of Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) that has just been published in the eminent journal Science. A team led by Mainz anthropologist Professor Joachim Burger studied bones from the 'Blätterhöhle' cave near Hagen in Germany, where both hunter-gatherers and farmers were buried. "It is commonly ...

In the land of 10,000 lakes, one lake has been the starting place for research with implications for big lakes around the world. According to a study published online this week in Science, University of Minnesota researchers, building from studies of nitrogen levels in Lake Superior, uncovered a good news/bad news scenario for lake health that has long-term, global implications for pollution control efforts. While many water-quality cleanup efforts focusing on the reduction of phosphorus have been highly effective, that success can also result in a decrease in microbial ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," goes the playground rhyme that's supposed to help children endure taunts from classmates. But a new study suggests that there's more going on inside our brains when someone snubs us – and that the brain may have its own way of easing social pain. The findings, recently published in Molecular Psychiatry by a University of Michigan Medical School team, show that the brain's natural painkiller system responds to social rejection – not just physical injury. What's more, people who ...

Normally muscles contract in order to support the body, but in a rare condition known as cataplexy the body's muscles "fall asleep" and become involuntarily paralyzed. Cataplexy is incapacitating because it leaves the affected individual awake, but either fully or partially paralyzed. It is one of the bizarre symptoms of the sleep disorder called narcolepsy. "Cataplexy is characterized by muscle paralysis during cognitive awareness, but we didn't understand how this happened until now, said John Peever of the University of Toronto's Department of Cell & Systems Biology. ...

WASHINGTON—Research conducted by the National Geographic Genographic Project, a multiyear global initiative that uses DNA to map the history of human migration, is helping unravel the timing and source of human settlement in Central Europe. New ancient-DNA research led by the National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and researchers from the University of Mainz in Germany and the State Heritage Museum in Halle (Germany) showed a pattern of genetic replacement taking place across several millennia in a region of central ...

Cambridge, Mass. – October 10, 2013 – Thirty-eight U.S. national parks are experiencing "accidental fertilization" at or above a critical threshold for ecological damage, according to a study published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and led by Harvard University researchers. Unless significant controls on ammonia emissions are introduced at a national level, they say, little improvement is likely between now and 2050. The environmental scientists, experts in air quality, atmospheric chemistry, and ecology, have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based ...

A discovery at Rice University aims to make vehicles that run on compressed natural gas more practical. It might also prolong the shelf life of bottled beer and soda. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has enhanced a polymer material to make it far more impermeable to pressurized gas and far lighter than the metal in tanks now used to contain the gas. The combination could be a boon for an auto industry under pressure to market consumer cars that use cheaper natural gas. It could also find a market in food and beverage packaging. Tour and his colleagues at Rice and ...